Guide on how to convince "doubters"

I have noticed several people mentioning that they have problems convincing others that T9A is actually a more balanced system than the ones available from commercial companies. This became apparent to me again when talking to @Omarcomin yesterday.

Arguments brought fourth usually include (filled with logical fallacies):

It's a community project, therefore it can't possibly be as balanced and good as a similar product from a "professional" company and will likely contain all kinds of crazy rules just to make people happy

Companies have more resources available, therefore the balance and background must also be better by default

T9A will go down without its own model range and support in that department

To address the first two points, I would start by showing them this monstrosity, which somewhat resembles a biochemical pathway (I was a bit dumbstruck when I saw this for the first time and couldn't believe my eyes):

1)
I think this should dispel the notion that community projects are by default badly organized and that the rules are worse in balance than rules from commercial companies (point out that the opposite is the case). Here you can point out the different levels on which balancing occurs:

Feedback from the community

Feedback from playtesters

Feedback from tournament organizers

The subsequent interactions between several levels of the team: Army Book Support, Army Book Committee, Balancing Board and Data Analysts (do they think miniature companies use data analysts, really?!), the Rules Team and the Executive Board, with additional input from the Advisory Board.

Another thing to point out is the very centralized organization of this project which allows easy interaction and cooperation between people from all over the world (mainly via this amazing forum).

2)
The second point from above is about the resources of a community project compared to a professional company. This can be refuted in the following way:

Putting more money into something doesn't automatically make it better. GW only had a few people working on Army Books for years, because they didn't put a lot of emphasis on the rules, but on selling models.

Stress this point: The main goal of commercial companies is to sell models, nothing else! If a company that supports an entire game system, with rules, miniatures and everything, releases new miniatures, they want to make sure they get sold. There are people who are content with just buying good looking models, but there also people who only buy miniatures they can use in an efficient and beneficial way in their games. To get the money from the second group, the company will always be tempted to give powerful rules to new releases, to make sure they sell enough models. GW is especially infamous for giving in to this tempation, which over the years has lead to tremendous power creep and completely erodes the balance of any gaming system.

A lot of people working on this project are professionals in their line of work and are filled with a lot of passion to make this succeed.

3)
The third point is about T9A not having its own range of miniatures. Arguments to refute the notion that this is a disadvantage are as follows:

Because T9A doesn't have a commercial company behind it, the project isn't affected by bad sales, therefore basically guaranteeing its longevity. And also its balance, see arguments above.

T9A doesn't require players to use specific models, instead they can use any model that could reasonably represent a given unit, as long as it's on the right base. This provides enormous flexibility to both players and miniature producers!

New and ambitious miniature producing companies have already stepped up and aligned themselves with this project, namely Tabletop Miniatures Solutions (TMS) and Shieldwolf Miniatures (Kudos to @Kanadian and @Shieldwolf Miniatures at this point: your products are absolutely amazing so far and I look forward to buying lots of your stuff )

While I wish our current miniature supporters all the best and hope they succeed beyond their wildest dreams along with this project: more companies will step up in the future if (or better: as soon as) this gaming system becomes more popular. This will create a healthy competition, which in turn ensures that prices stay fair and the quality improves over time. GW are already pretty far removed from the concept of "fair prices" because they had a monopoly for a long time, though one has to acknowledge that the quality of their miniatures is very good. But nothing that can't be matched by the two companies I just mentioned (so far it seems that they might even be able to surpass the quality of GW).

Concluding remarks

I hope the list of arguments above helps you to convince other gamers that T9A is in fact a highly professional project with good balance and a brilliant future. Thank you for your attention and I hope it was a good read and that my reasoning and arguments were sound.

Also don't forget to point out the biggest advantage this system has:Burning Passion!

PS: Be nice about it, be polite and listen to their concerns! You gain nothing by being condescending.

Images

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The post was edited 4 times, last by Draecarion (May 14th 2016, 12:31am).

Solid post. Honestly now that things have got rolling with V1 you can really see how far the project has come, and for me it's the community that is the strength. For years I've felt that fantasy forums were a little bit on the dead side. By comparison we are literally too active for the hosts!

One of the most infuriating arguements from people who still play 8th is that T9A "Won't last". Hang on, 8th is already definitely dead and despite all the wishful thinking AoS is not going anywhere! I've yet to convince anyone to try T9A so far which is depressing as I'm all for it. Thats a really useful debunk though and I'll be stealing it!

True. But sometimes opinions are just outright wrong and you can try to clear things up (nicely and politely!). That's the first step and then follows the process you mention. There are cases where people just refuse to look at T9A because of prejudices. This post addresses that. And once (if) this problem has been overcome you can play games with them and draw them into the community

The key is to engage. So what if they are wrong? Let them have their rant, sympathize, agree where you can and shut the heck up where you cannot. You can't tell people to like something, it just doesn't work.

The key is to engage. So what if they are wrong? Let them have their rant, sympathize, agree where you can and shut the heck up where you cannot. You can't tell people to like something, it just doesn't work.

I don't think you have it backwards and neither should you think I have it backwards. Because both cases exist. Sometimes you can pull people in by just engaging them. At other times that just doesn't work. For this I simply provide a few helpful hints, which some people could find helpful.

The best way to convince someone to play 9th Age is to play games of 9th Age in front of them. Once they see how well it works, the game pretty much sells itself, for the most part.

Indeed. If that option is available it's the most effective method (if you can't convince them to play with you themselves, like There Is No Spoon mentioned).
If there are still any doubts remaining, you can come back to this